And Mourinho continues to make no secret of his desire to further bolster United having failed to win any of their four matches in 90 minutes during their tour of the US.

"I would like to have two more players. I think I am not going to get two," Mourinho told reporters. "I think that it's possible I will have one. And that one, I gave a list to my club of five names a few months ago. And I wait to see if it's possible to have one of these players.

"If it's possible. it's possible, if it's not it's not. If it's possible, it's good, if not then we keep fighting and working and believing in the players that we have."

United were put to the sword in the second half by a superior Liverpool side, who netted three unanswered goals courtesy of Daniel Sturridge, Oluwaseyi Ojo and Xherdan Shaqiri after Andreas Pereira's stunning free-kick had cancelled out Sadio Mane's opener.

The Red Devils have been without a host of their stars following the World Cup, with the likes of Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku, David de Gea, Nemanja Matic – who will miss the start of the season due to injury – Jesse Lingard and Marcus Rashford enjoying holidays.

"This is nothing to do with reinforcements," Mourinho said. The reinforcements are Pogba, [Marouane] Fellaini, [Victor] Lindelof, Rashford, Lingard, Matic, [Antonio] Valencia. These are reinforcements.

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"This is not our team this is not our squad. We started the game with almost half of the players who are not even going to belong to our squad on August 9. They will not be here.

"This is not our squad. Reinforcements, you mean players that I would like to buy, to add to the squad. That's another thing, but this is not my squad, this is not even half my squad, or 30 per cent of it. So don't look to this.

"You can ask me if I still want new players, that's another question. But in relation to today, we have four or five players who are dead because they care with the club and try to give everything, even risking themselves, because they don't want to let all the kids play by themselves against AC Milan, against Liverpool."